A little later, it occured to me that maybe what the market might be missing is a statement from the IETF, IESG and/or IAB, that IPv6 is now *ready*, and can be deployed in production via the available transition mechanisms, slowly replacing IPv4 (+ NAT). Maybe the market is really just waiting for the engineers behind IPv6 to say "it's basically finished, its now ready for you to use, pending your applications being ported".
But unfortunately, IPv6 _isn't_ ready. See the site local debate. See the flowlabel goings-on. See the multihoming problem. I'm not sure what the status of DHCPv6 is except that I haven't seen it in the wild anywhere yet. And there are no reasonable other ways to dynamically find DNS servers in IPv6. That's all protocol stuff. Hopefully all of this can be fixed in the not too distant future. But there there is another extremely important issue that (in my not so humble opinion) must absolutely be fixed before making any such statement: the DNS. It is currently impossible to resolve DNS names over IPv6 transport, because the roots don't support IPv6 transport, none of the major gTLDs supports IPv6 transport and very few, if any, TLDs support IPv6 glue records for delegated domains.
I think we need IPv6 roots and at least one significant gTLD that fully supports IPv6, so that two IPv6-only sites can resolve each other's names and communicate without any IPv4 dependencies. We also need IPv6-only hosts to dynamically find DNS servers (or define some site anycast DNS addresses that can be hardcoded), have addresses that remain present/stable regardless of ISP connectivity. Some good multihoming wouldn't suck either, but since most end-users don't multihome this doesn't have to be a hard requirement. But with this other stuff in place such an announcement would be possible.
* configuration ease - The protocol must permit easy and largely
distributed configuration and operation. Automatic configuration of
hosts and routers is required.
This test fails because of lack of dynamic DNS discovery.
* mobility - The protocol must support mobile hosts, networks and
internetworks.
Hm...
That brings to my mind two questions
a) Is IPv4 going to be formally deprecated when IPv6 is good enough? If so, are the related IPv4 NAT RFCs also going to be deprecated at that time ?
Would it be a smart move to deprecate something that 100% of the systems connected to the internet use?
b) Is IPv6 good enough yet ?
Not yet... but we're making progress.
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